Wednesday, December 24, 2014

Merry Christmas to all. I had a great gift Christmas Eve when I opened ESPN the Mag to see myself quoted and a graphic produced to show Value Add. However, as I write in an upcoming piece on Breitbart Sports, the best basketball gift this year came to Marquette. My amazement over just how good Luke Fischer has been led me to bounce all of Jeff Goodman's transfer list against the www.valueaddbasketball.com database to see how many other midseason transfers have had the big initial impact on their teams.

"The metric, developed by stats pro John Pudner, assesses how many wins a player contributes to his team over that of a theoretical replacement player, similar to baseball's WAR. If Wright keeps it up, "he'd be one of the greatest college players ever," John Pudner, ESPN the Magazine, December 22, 2014 - page 26

The answer is only one comes close - Jesse Morgan has been almost as good in his two games for Temple including their destruction of Kansas - and there are only five total that project to add more than a point to their team's average score. Luke projects to be the 59th best player in the country at this pace, and more importantly make Marquette the 50th best team which would give us a shot. The top 5 midseason transfers are below (Luke projects to be worth 7.06 points on our average score).

Midseason Transfer

Team

Ht

Database

Projections

Proj Rnk

40 Fischer, Luke

Marquette

6' 11"

1.92

7.06

59

3 Morgan, Jesse

Temple

6'5"

1.00

6.00

111

11 Goodman, Savon

Arizona St.

6' 6"

1.27

5.08

184

0 Russell, DeWayne

Grand Canyon

5' 11"

1.21

3.62

388

10 Worsham, Raeford

Jackson St.

6' 4"

1.04

2.70

628

BTW, if Georgetown beats Indiana Saturday, the Big East should be ranked 3rd at www.kenpom.com since we trail the Big Ten .7909 to .7908 right now.

In this season of hope, will hope the real gift comes in March. But for now Merry Christmas!